There is a quarry not far from where I live. It isn’t a well-known place. The quarry is pretty hidden off the side of a cycling trail, and it was closed some time ago, now filled to the top with water. I found the place on Google Maps, thinking it was just a pond hidden from the trail by trees, but it turned out to be a bit of a hidden gem.
My friend Anna and I biked to the spot. It was gorgeous. There were towering limestone walls on the far side, with trees atop them, and all kinds of fish were swimming in the turquoise water.
It was beautiful; on the surface.
Anna and I rarely saw anyone else at the quarry, though, on occasion, people would be fishing or swimming when we arrived. One time I started a conversation with a guy who claimed some buddies of his hauled a cart of scuba gear down to the quarry and tried to reach the bottom. However, their diving lights were not bright enough, and the pair didn’t make it very far down before returning to the surface. He also told me the name of the quarry.
After getting home that day, I Googled the name he gave me and only found a few articles and a handful of photos. From what I could gather, the quarry had been closed for over 50 years. Rock gathered from the quarry was used to build wing dams along a nearby river. Things weren’t all that interesting until I came across an article that mentioned a man named Bryan, who once hauled limestone from the quarry.
Bryan stated that he witnessed thousands of leaking, rusty barrels back when he used to work at the quarry. He suspects these barrels contained chemicals from a nearby uranium processing plant where radioactive waste management has occurred for decades.
I decided to look for these barrels because I was fairly confident that dumping radioactive waste into a pit where it could leach into groundwater was not the proper way to dispose of it. I thought I could be some hero who stopped people from swimming in a contaminated quarry. I don’t know. However, there was no way I was swimming in a quarry lake that possibly contained radioactive waste to find these barrels. So, I shot a text to Anna and sent her the articles I found. Soon we came up with a plan.
I purchased a pretty pricey diving light off of Amazon, and after a little ingenuity, I strapped it to my waterproof GoPro. I then gathered my deep sea fishing pole and tied the GoPro and light to the end of the line. I put the stuff in my car and drove down to the quarry, where I met Anna, who had her kayak strapped into a kayak cart. She wheeled it down to the quarry, and I followed, carrying my gear. When we arrived, she dropped the kayak and pushed it into the shallow water.
“You’re up,” she said.
I put my fishing pole in the kayak and tried to get in without touching the dreaded uranium water. I paddled out into the middle of the quarry, turned on the flashlight and GoPro, and dropped it. The GoPro and flashlight fell for an eternity, and I thought I would run out of line, but eventually, I felt it hit bottom.
I let the kayak drift and lifted the rod every so often to force the GoPro to move slightly across the bottom and keep it from getting stuck on anything. I dropped it in a couple more places near the middle of the quarry before Anna yelled from shore that she needed to get back home. Something along the lines of a relative of hers coming over that night.
I reeled in the GoPro and light, turned them off, and paddled back to shore. We walked back to our cars and parted ways. I told her I would send her the footage when I got home.
When I got to my place, I plugged my GoPro into my laptop and pulled up the footage. I fast-forwarded until the camera hit the bottom of the quarry. The light seemed to work well enough, I couldn’t see far, but it would do. The camera was pointing at something yellowish-white. I couldn’t tell what it was until the camera started moving from when I moved the fishing pole.
For some reason, I almost laughed. Hell, I found it hilarious. A skull at the bottom of the quarry? And the GoPro happened to land right beside it. After a few moments, it sank in. A skull. A human skull. At the bottom of a quarry. I kept watching to check if it wasn’t some rock that looked like a skull or maybe a Halloween decoration, but this looked like the real thing. I sat back in my chair and paused the video. I felt like my heart was beating directly between my ears. I forced my hand back to the mouse and continued watching.
There were more. As the GoPro slowly skidded across the bottom of the quarry, more bones became visible. A ribcage, another skull that the GoPro bumped into, causing the GoPro and light to sway side to side, revealing more and more bones. I kept watching. All I could see were the bones scattering the bottom of the pit.
They never ended.
Even the second and third recordings when I had dropped the GoPro in a different position. All I could see were human bones. I ran to my bathroom and vomited. Then I sat there for a long while, kneeling over the toilet. A text from Anna shook me out of it.
“Hey! Find those barrels yet?”
I got up and sat down at my desk. I stared at the timed-out black screen of the laptop.
“Bad news. Even with the light, the footage is too dark to make out anything,” I replied.
“What? That fucking sucks,” she sent.
I put my phone down and eyed the laptop. I moved my finger across the mousepad to wake the screen up and stared at the now still image of bones. I picked up my phone to dial 911, but that image stopped me. Hundreds, maybe thousands of skulls at the bottom of an abandoned quarry that hardly anyone knows of, a place perfect for hiding bodies. Were these the bodies of other people who looked into the quarry’s past? I had no idea if Bryan was still alive. Was he one of these bodies?
I put the phone down. I never called the police. I was too scared to tell anyone about this. Anna asks me to go back to the quarry every so often to go fishing or to attach a brighter light to the GoPro and find out what’s down there. I know what’s down there, and I’m running out of excuses to say no to going there. I have kept the SD card with the footage on it, and I have it hidden somewhere no one will find it.
I am terrified day and night that I will wind up in the company of those bones, or worse, Anna will. Recently I’ve seen a blacked-out SUV parked in the street near my home. My thoughts are so jumbled I can’t remember if my neighbors have owned one all this time. Most nights, I stay up until I pass out from staring out of the blinds at the SUV. I can’t even tell if anyone is in it.
Maybe I have watched too many horror movies. Maybe, I’m just paranoid. Maybe, I should go to the police, but I’m unsure about all this. I feel I can’t tell my family or friends about any of this. So I’ll have to settle with telling a bunch of strangers on the internet who will likely brush this off or forget they ever read this after a few weeks.
I only hope that getting this off my chest will keep me afloat a little longer because right now, I feel like I’m sinking like I’m going to sink down to the bottom of that quarry.
I never found any barrels.